Since 2011 Chevron has refused to pay nearly $19 billion in damages awarded by an Ecuadorian court to Amazonian residents who live in areas polluted by Texaco, a company Chevron bought. During nearly two decades of contentious litigation, the fourth-largest oil company in the world has appealed the ruling in Ecuadorian courts, attempted to block the Ecuadorian judgment in U.S. federal courts and more recently sued Steven Donziger, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, for racketeering.

“Unlike BP's Gulf spill that was the result of a single cataclysmic event, Texaco's oil extraction system in Ecuador was designed, built, and operated on the cheap using substandard technology from the outset,” NGO Amazon Watch states.

In 1993, 47 Amazonian farmers, representing 30,000 Ecuadorian farmers and indigenous tribal peoples, sued the company in a U.S. federal court in New York. The lawsuit alleged that 83 percent of the population of the affected area suffered one or more diseases attributable to hydrocarbon contamination, including cancer. It demanded $27 billion in damages - what would be the largest settlement claim in oil industry history. It was also the first time indigenous peoples from the Amazon sued a U.S. oil company in its country of origin.

“This case is also a leading example of how courts have the potential to re-allocate some of the costs of globalization—in this case, environmental destruction—from the most vulnerable rainforest dwellers to the most powerful energy companies on the planet,” Donziger said.

For almost nine years Texaco denied wrongdoing and fought to avoid trial in the U.S. In 2001, when Chevron bought Texaco, it took its place as defendant in the lawsuit. A year later, a U.S. judge ruled that the case should be tried in Ecuador. The Amazonian residents sued again in 2003, this time in the Ecuadorian court.

Chevron argues that it is not responsible for any of the pollution in Ecuador, and that Texaco had cleaned up whatever spills it was responsible for prior to the merger of the two companies. It claims that whatever pollution remains in the rainforest was caused by Ecuador’s national oil company, Petroecuador, which took over oil production in the area after Texaco left in 1992.

“At the heart of Chevron’s legal predicament is a massive case of buyer’s remorse,” Bloomberg Businessweek reported. “The company fought for more than eight years to get the pollution suit moved to Ecuador, believing it would be more likely to prevail there than in the U.S. When it became clear that it would lose in Ecuador, Chevron came back to U.S. courts seeking to undermine the Ecuadorian proceedings.”

Since Chevron has no assets in Ecuador, the Amazonian villagers have taken the fight to Argentinian, Brazilian and Canadian courts, hoping to enforce the Ecuadorian ruling and seize assets held by the oil company’s subsidiaries there.

"Chevron Corp, the sole judgment debtor, has no assets in Argentina. All operations in Argentina are conducted by subsidiaries that have nothing to do with the fraudulent judgment in Ecuador," Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson told the Chicago Tribune.

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that foreign judgments like the Ecuador ruling are enforceable in Canada if there is a “real and substantive connection” between the foreign jurisdiction and the subject matter of the claim. The judge is expected to decide later this month whether to recognize the Ecuadorian ruling.

Chevron claims that Donziger committed fraud in order to win his case in Ecuador. To search for evidence the company filed legal demands for information late last year on Internet service providers, dozens of environmental activists and NGOs, writers, lawyers, and others who say they were tangentially involved with Chevron’s Ecuador case as well as some who appear to have no connection at all.

Chevron’s subpoenas demand data that would show when and from where people logged into more than 70 private email accounts. Those caught in the dragnet include people who had exchanged email correspondence with Donziger over the time span of nine years: personal friends, bloggers and others. The subpoena does not ask for the content of the emails.

“Our case is about a massive fraud and extortion scheme for billions of dollars,” said Randy Mastro, a lawyer representing Chevron in the case. “The conspirators enlisted a network of not-for-profits, so-called shareholders who were acting independently but really acting in collusion to get out their false story. We have a right to take discovery of those shareholders and those groups they enlisted to try to find out the methods of the scheme.”

“This information would allow Chevron to create a virtual itinerary of who each individual has met with, and other potentially sensitive information implicating associational freedoms, which are protected by the First Amendment,” Marcia Hoffman, the EFF attorney wrote in legal documents filed in October 2012, referring to the legal right to free speech.

On this matter, the company has presented conflicting information about the impact of the $19 billion judgement. To shareholders, Chevron stated in its February 2011 annual report: “Because Chevron has no substantial assets in Ecuador, Chevron would expect enforcement actions as a result of this judgment to be brought in other jurisdictions. Chevron expects to contest any such actions.”

On the other hand, Chevron presents the legal and financial threats to the company in Ecuador quite differently in its racketeering suit against Donziger. A week before the company’s annual report was published, Rex Mitchell, deputy comptroller of Chevron, stated under oath: “Unless it is stopped, Defendants’ announced plan to cause disruption to Chevron’s supply chain is likely to cause irreparable injury to Chevron’s business reputation and business relationships that would not be remediable by money damages.”

Chevron contends that DiNapoli, along with Donziger, have “orchestrated a scheme to extort a multibillion-dollar payoff from Chevron in connection with a fraudulent litigation against Chevron in Lago Agrio, Ecuador.”

DiNapoli’s office has said the accusations are baseless.

Experts say that it is not unusual for shareholders to request that companies hire an independent environmental expert to sit on a board, and asking the S.E.C. to review a company’s disclosures is “fair game for shareholders.”

But what is unusual is for a company to target the shareholders, said Timothy Smith, a vice president at Walden Asset Management, another socially responsible investment company .